Not for him, who has died full of honor and years;
From the round at the top he has stepped to the sky—
It is blessed to go when so ready to die!
The members of President Harrison’s family immediately vacated the Executive Mansion, and the grief-stricken widow ceased the preparations for her prolonged absence from home. What a shock this death must have been to her! For many months an interested spectator, if not an actor, in the stirring events of the canvass and election, afterward a sharer in the triumphs of her husband, and for weeks anticipating the happy reunion in the mansion of the Presidents, to be rudely torn by fate from his presence for ever, and to see every hope lying crushed around her, would have harrowed a nature of coarsest mould. She was summoned from the busy care of forwarding some matter of interest to be told that he was dead. Dead! she could scarcely believe the evidences of her senses. Dead! or was she mistaken in what was said to her? His last letter was before her, and she had scarcely ceased reading the accounts in the papers of the magnificence of the inaugural ball.
Howsoever cruel the blow, it was borne meekly and humbly by the Christian wife and mother, and she aroused herself from the stupor in which the announcement had thrown her.
In July, the remains of the sincerely regretted President and deeply mourned husband and father were removed to their present resting-place at North Bend.
Had her husband lived, Mrs. Harrison would have gone to Washington and discharged faithfully and conscientiously the duties of her position. But her residence there would not have been in accordance with her wishes or her taste.
She continued to reside at her old home, where the happiest years of her life had been spent, until the autumn of 1855, when she removed from the old homestead to the residence of her only surviving son, Hon. J. Scott Harrison, five miles below North Bend, on the Ohio river. She remained an inmate of his family until her death.
During the latter part of her life, she had many and severe attacks of illness, and perhaps nothing but the skill and devoted medical services of her physicians, and the almost idolatrous attentions of her granddaughters, kept the lamp of her life flickering so long. Her grandsons, too, claimed their share in this labor of love, and when the telegraph bore to their distant homes the tidings of her illness, they came with their wives to wait at her bedside, and whatever of business was suspended or neglected, their attentions to her were not relaxed for a moment. In a recent letter received from a granddaughter of Mrs. Harrison’s, this paragraph occurs: “Of many of the facts of her later life I was an eye-witness, as I was an inmate of my father’s family for three years previous to her death, and had the inestimable privilege of seeing her beautiful Christian resignation and conformity to the will of God as life drew to its close. Indeed, it was upon my breast that she breathed her precious life away.”
Mrs. Harrison was not indifferent to the political events of the age in which she lived, and few were better informed with regard to public men and measures than herself. Much of her time she spent in reading, during the closing years of her life, and she kept herself informed, through the medium of the daily papers, of the transactions of the outside world. Very few persons of even younger years took a greater interest in the movements of the armies during the late civil war, or could give a more succinct and graphic account of the details of a campaign.